I keep my sensory kit in an Arcteryx Maka 1 belly bag (a waist/fanny/lumbar pack worn front). My belly bag is always with me. Anything I carry around this much can’t be on my back. It must be curated down to the things that are worth their mass and worn below the aching suspension of my pained back. I’m stooped enough. Waist packs worn front hit a sweet spot of retrievability, gravity budgeting, and pain management. I can bear the weight, and when I unzip the compartments, everything therein is first order retrievable.

An Arcteryx Maka 1 fanny pack in a green-ish brown color rests atop a fuzzy pink pillow. The front of the belly bag has a colorful bear shaped patch affixed with velcro. A beaded stim loop and its little carry bag are attached to a zipper pull. A length of yellow shock cord is attached to another zipper pull. The bag has two horizontal zippered pockets.The largest of the two pockets contains a blue beanie hat, a black sleep mask, sunglasses in a microfiber slip case, and an assortment of office supplies (pen, pencil, razor, black marker, field notebook, field wipebook).The smaller pocket opens to reveal a white AirPod case, a black Vibes case, and some other things not visible in the picture.

The following are things I use to manage overwhelm, conserve spoons, and get through each day. With the exception of the noise-cancelling headphones and the bluetooth sleep mask, they all reside in the belly bag. These are tested in the field of my disabled and autistic life. While attempting brevity, I’ll describe how each fits into my flow.

Vibes Ear Plugs

Foam ear plugs can amplify my tinnitus. Even when they turn up the ringing, I keep them in because I sleep better through tinnitus than ambient sound.

Vibes don’t block as much sound as foam ear plugs, but their “breathability” amplifies my tinnitus less. Lately, I’ve been using the Vibes as my go to sleeping ear plug with good results. In noisier environments where I want isolation, I use the foam.

The stems serve as handles, making extraction much easier than with foam.

The snap case that comes with the Vibes is large enough to hold both the pair of Vibes and a pair of foam plugs. I like the size and affirmative closure of the snap case, though it requires two hands to open. It fits easily in the smaller compartment of my belly bag.

Noise-cancelling Headphones

Nose-cancelling headphones are also part of my go-everywhere sensory kit. Since they don’t fit in the belly bag, they are usually to be found around my neck. I feel better knowing they’re there.

AirPods

They’re expensive. To get their full benefits, you need an expensive iPhone. I wish this accessibility tech was more affordable, because AirPodsmakemefeel augmented, especially with the arrival of Siri Shortcuts. AirPods provide convenient sensory management and a voice interface to my cognitive net. I leave these in for hours at a time: playing music, setting timers and alarms, creating tasks in Things, and accessing the checklists that order my life. When not in my ears, they stow comfortably in the belly bag in the same pocket as the Vibes snap case (and some other stuff).

I forget I have these hanging from my ears. “Hanging” is the key to comfort. When I first got them, I was “inserting”. Ear burn came on quickly because their hard plastic was pressing against the ridge poking out along the top of my ear canal. Once I let go of the “you gotta push ‘em in there to not lose ‘em” anxiety and started hanging instead of inserting, comfort came.

Two taps to pause. Remove a bud to pause. Instant pairing. Siri Shortcuts. Disability means getting used to bad flow, flow not designed for you, flow not accessible to you. This is good flow that removes some thoughtlessness and frustration from my world.

I once heard a blind person say, “With my cane, my brain, and my trusty iPhone, I can go anywhere.” I agree with the statement completely, but it’s time to update that statement to the 2018 version:

Give me a set of AirPods to go with my iPhone, and I can go anywhere-and surreptitiously know a lot about my environment while doing so.

Sleep Mask

I’m light sensitive, so my go everywhere sensory kit also includes a sleep mask. I like ones with raised eye cups, such as the Wirecutter recommendedNidra Deep Rest. The Deep Rest rolls up compactly and fits comfortably in the large compartment of my belly bag right alongside my sunglasses.

Bluetooth Sleep Mask

Unlike the other parts of my sensory kit, I don’t carry this with me all the time. It’s usually on a bedside table, though I’ll loop it through the belt of my belly bag when I want to keep it with me, such as on a car trip.

I use the mask from Topointas recommended by Brett Terpstra. The padded nose bridge lifts the mask off the eyes. There’s not as much eyelash clearance as the Nidra Deep Rest, so your lashes might brush the mask when you blink. With eyes closed, I have the clearance I need to be comfortable.

The controls are placed on the left cheek. After laying on my left side for awhile, the pressure is noticeable, though I can still fall asleep.

The controls are certainly not the easiest to use without looking, but I got the hang of it. Since I put the mask on when I’m ready to fall asleep to a favorite playlist or to a white noise generator, I don’t interact with the controls much anyway.

These don’t provide the isolation of an over-ear or ear buds, but they do a good enough job to put me in the sensory space I want to be in.

This mask sleeps hotter than the Nidra Deep Rest.

Sunglasses and Light-reactive Glasses

My bifocals have light-reactive, photochromic lenses that protect my light-sensitive eyes without having to swap into sunglasses whenever I walk outside.

Light-reactive lenses react to UV. Car windows block UV. I always keep a pair of dedicated sunglasses in my belly bag so I can use them when in the car or indoors.

Beanie Hats

I always have a hat with me. They are an important part of my sensory management. Beanies are my go to because they’re light, packable, cover my ears, and provide gentle, even pressure to my scalp.

My lightest weight beanie is a Smartwool PhD Ultra Light. It stuffs down small enough to keep in my belly bag at all times. This hat can actually cool me down when out in the sun. It blocks some rays while wicking sweat. Sometimes, I put it on and immediately feel that evaporative cooling sensation.

It doesn’t go down over the ears as much as I’d like, though. I find myself trying to tug it down. Smartwool, a slightly longer PhD Ultra Light would suit me fine.

My go to beanie is the Smartwool PhD Light. It has the full ear coverage I like. It’s notably heavier than the Ultra Light since it is two layers instead of one, but it still packs down small enough to fit in the belly bag.

Smartwool’s The Lid comes out when I need a little more warmth. It’s too big to pack into the belly bag, so I loop it through the belt of the bag.

I like the fit and scalp pressure of Smartwool’s beanies.

Stim Toys

I make my own stim jewelry from beads and beading wire. I keep a stim loop attached to the belly bag. I put a finger’s width of slack in the wire of the loop so that I can spin and slide the beads. It can be used one-handed while attached to the bag or can be removed for two-handed play.

A stim loop made from brass ball bearing beads, turquoise heishi beads, copper basket beads, and irregularl shaped turqiouse beads with one flat side. Medium weight beading wire holds it all together. The loop rests on a white beading mat.Another view of the stim loop resting on a green cutting mat with a white ruled grid.

I use a length of light shock cord as a zipper pull. The stretch is stimmy goodness. I ran the cord through a piece of rubbery tubing. I enjoy the texture and the tug of this simple stim.

A yellow shock cord with rubber tubing attached to a zipper pull of the belly bag. My finger pulls the cord to demonstrate the stretch. A fuzzy pink pillow is in the background.

Tile Trackers

Medications and chronic pain can increase distractibility and impact cognition. I attach Tile trackers to keys, canes, headphones, purses, and bags. I attach one to the key leash of the belly bag. Searching for necessary coping tools while grimacing with pain is frustrating and dispiriting. Tile trackers provide a comforting cognitive net.

Double pressing the button on the Tiles rings your phone. With a Tile on my belly bag (as well as on my headphones and canes), I’m always able to summon my phone from its hiding places in the depths of couches and bedding.

They have to be replaced each year, which gets expensive. Tile is starting a subscription plan to make yearly replacement more affordable, but they still ain’t cheap.

The Three Roles of the Belly Bag

Sensory Coping

The principal role of my belly bag is to keep my sensory coping kit at hand wherever I am.

Throw in a cane and my big noise-cancelling over-the-ear headphones, and I’m good (enough) to go.

Cognitive Net

The secondary role of the belly bag is to augment my memory and be a part of my cognitive net. Belly bag is my toolbox for maintaining my stack and remembering what the hell I was just doing. Chronic pain is distracting. I lean on my net to help me through autistic burnout and fibro fog. With these tools and my phone, I can generate the lists, tables, labels, and badly drawn sketches that help me get stuff done despite pain and gravity poisoning:

Phone slip pockets are a must-have feature for me. When your phone is assistive and augmentative cognitive net, retrievability in the moment is important. The Maka 1’s slip pocket is a bit tight due to my card stuffed wallet case, but the holstering interaction lost friction as the bag and I found a rhythm. Any phone smaller than an iPhone 7+ bearing a crowded wallet case (pretty much everything?), will fit fine.

I’m always tinkering, and these are the very useful things I need most often. Small and practical, they cover the quiet needs of the every day: opening bottles of cold sparkling water, snicker snacking through packing tape and zip ties, lighting candles, incense, and water pipes, peering into cramped utility spaces, taking measurements for the next project in the Casita remodel, cleaning lenses, making templates.

I would argue, in total seriousness, that one of the places that Skinnerism thrives today is in computing technologies, particularly in “social” technologies. This, despite the field’s insistence that its development is a result, in part, of the cognitive turn that supposedly displaced behaviorism.

B. J. Fogg and his Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford is often touted by those in Silicon Valley as one of the “innovators” in this “new” practice of building “hooks” and “nudges” into technology. These folks like to point to what’s been dubbed colloquially “The Facebook Class” – a class Fogg taught in which students like Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the founders of Instagram, and Nir Eyal, the author of Hooked, “studied and developed the techniques to make our apps and gadgets addictive,” as Wired put it in a recent article talking about how some tech executives now suddenly realize that this might be problematic.

(It’s worth teasing out a little – but probably not in this talk, since I’ve rambled on so long already – the difference, if any, between “persuasion” and “operant conditioning” and how they imagine to leave space for freedom and dignity. Rhetorically and practically.)

I’m on the record elsewhere arguing this framing – “technology as addictive” – has its problems. Nevertheless it is fair to say that the kinds of compulsive behavior that we display with our apps and gadgets is being encouraged by design. All that pecking. All that clicking.

These are “technologies of behavior” that we can trace back to Skinner – perhaps not directly, but certainly indirectly due to Skinner’s continual engagement with the popular press. His fame and his notoriety. Behavioral management – and specifically through operant conditioning – remains a staple of child rearing and pet training. It is at the core of one of the most popular ed-tech apps currently on the market, ClassDojo. Behaviorism also underscores the idea that how we behave and data about how we behave when we click can give programmers insight into how to alter their software and into what we’re thinking.

If we look more broadly – and Skinner surely did – these sorts of technologies of behavior don’t simply work to train and condition individuals; many technologies of behavior are part of a broader attempt to reshape society. “For your own good,” the engineers try to reassure us. “For the good of the world.”

In that Baffler article, I make the argument that behavior management apps like ClassDojo’s are the latest manifestation of behaviorism, a psychological theory that has underpinned much of the development of education technology. Behaviorism is, of course, most closely associated with B. F. Skinner, who developed the idea of his “teaching machine” when he visited his daughter’s fourth grade class in 1953. Skinner believed that a machine could provide a superior form of reinforcement to the human teacher, who relied too much on negative reinforcement, punishing students for bad behavior than on positive reinforcement, the kind that better trains the pigeons.

But I think there’s been a resurgence in behaviorism. It’s epicenter isn’t Harvard, where Skinner taught. It’s Stanford. It’s Silicon Valley. And this new behaviorism is fundamental to how many new digital technologies are being built.

There’s a darker side still to this as I argued in the first article in this very, very long series: this kind of behavior management has become embedded in our new information architecture. It’s “fake news,” sure. But it’s also disinformation plus big data plus psychological profiling and behavior modification. The Silicon Valley “nudge” is a corporatenudge. But as these technologies are increasingly part of media, scholarship, and schooling, it’s a civics nudge too.

Those darling little ClassDojo monsters are a lot less cute when you see them as part of a new regime of educational data science, experimentation, and “psycho-informatics.”

One of my favorite anecdotes from Asperger’s thesis is when he asks an autistic boy in his clinic if he believes in God. “I don’t like to say I’m not religious,” the boy replies, “I just don’t have any proof of God.” That anecdote shows an appreciation of autistic non-compliance, which Asperger and his colleagues felt was as much a part of their patients’ autism as the challenges they faced. Asperger even anticipated in the 1970s that autistic adults who “valued their freedom” would object to behaviorist training, and that has turned out to be true.

Plenty of policies and programs limit our ability to do right by children. But perhaps the most restrictive virtual straitjacket that educators face is behaviorism – a psychological theory that would have us focus exclusively on what can be seen and measured, that ignores or dismisses inner experience and reduces wholes to parts. It also suggests that everything people do can be explained as a quest for reinforcement – and, by implication, that we can control others by rewarding them selectively.

Allow me, then, to propose this rule of thumb: The value of any book, article, or presentation intended for teachers (or parents) is inversely related to the number of times the word “behavior” appears in it. The more our attention is fixed on the surface, the more we slight students’ underlying motives, values, and needs.

It’s been decades since academic psychology took seriously the orthodox behaviorism of John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner, which by now has shrunk to a cult-like clan of “behavior analysts.” But, alas, its reductionist influence lives on – in classroom (and schoolwide) management programs like PBIS and Class Dojo, in scripted curricula and the reduction of children’s learning to “data,” in grades and rubrics, in “competency”- and “proficiency”-based approaches to instruction, in standardized assessments, in reading incentives and merit pay for teachers.>

It’s time we outgrew this limited and limiting psychological theory. That means attending less to students’ behaviors and more to the students themselves.

When learning is allowed to be project, problem, and passion driven, then children learn because of their terroir, not disengage in spite of it. When we recognize biodiversity in our schools as healthy, then we increase the likelihood that our ecosystems will thrive.

To be contributors to educating children to live in a world that is increasingly challenging to negotiate, schools must be ​conceptualized as ecological communities, spaces for learning with the potential to embody all of the concepts of the ecosystem – interactivity, biodiversity, connections, adaptability, succession, and balance. These concepts have become a lens through which we consider and understand the schools we observe and what makes learning thrive in some spaces and not others.

The problem is that standardization becomes the antithesis of creativity in schools. There’s no “follow the questions” inquiry or problem‐ and project‐driven assessments in standardized classrooms. Covering the standardized curricula means rejecting the biodiversity of communities that have the potential to generate new ways of thinking based on their own unique environments. Those statistical norms that drive much of standardized practice seem to be built for mythical school communities, model neighborhood schools where we expect students to succeed in the same way. Using “teacher‐proof” assessments and programs makes a lot of sense if the goal is one‐size‐fits all schooling. The programmed learning of today—moving through curricula paced to finish on time for testing and using filtered pedagogies designed to maximize standardized testing results—is just twentieth‐century efficiency and effectiveness, carrot and stick, management by ​objective, modernized through contemporary technologies and infused with algorithmic monitoring systems.

But in our work, we have learned that no average human exists, no median community does either. And we have learned that human learning is messy and complex, and that childhood, especially, is very messy, and very complex. Authentic opportunities for learners to create, design, build, engineer, and compose cannot truly coexist within the standardization model. That’s why tinkering around the edges, adding a “genius hour” to an otherwise unchanged school day, accomplishes nothing except to highlight all that’s wrong with our schools for this century.

A school cannot change without system change. Nothing can.

It is reckless to suppose that biodiversity can be diminished indefinitely without threatening humanity itself.

– E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation (n.d.)

It doesn’t take long to figure out when observing the natural world that biodiversity creates pathways for organisms to not just survive, but also to thrive within ecosystems. Unlike the cornfields of Michigan where row after row of hybrid plants are identical to every other one, nature seems to appreciate differences among species. It’s a way of foolproofing longevity that stretches back generations across millennia, and the variety within and among species tends to support an entire ecosystem to sustain balance and thrive. In the scientific world, geneticists worry about our dependence upon crops that have been standardized genetically. The hybrid tomatoes keep longer in the grocery store, but the scientists know they are subject to potential blights that can wipe out the entire crop in a short period of time. It’s happened before – with corn, potatoes, and citrus crops. It’s why plant geneticists recommend never becoming reliant upon a single hybrid. It’s why ecologists know that biodiversity matters in an ecosystem. It’s the opposite of what we are doing inside the human ecology of our schools.​

We need variety and biodiversity in schools, too. The walls of schools are a contrived barrier that keeps kids and teachers apart within the system. The walls of schools keep new practices, tools, and strategies out and traditions in. When we think about creating a biodiversity of learning, we turn to new ways of thinking about how systems change. That doesn’t happen without removing barriers that wall off the potential for change. We have found that breaking walls is best interpreted through the ecological lens as defined by the work of Yong Zhao and Ken Frank, who framed the problem of introduction of a new species in Lake Michigan as having similarity to introducing a new practice, tool, or strategy into a school (ETEC 511 n.d.).

We also believe in the concept of terroir, used so beautifully as a metaphor by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze in Walk Out Walk On – that the soil and climate of two different continents produce variations in crops even when the seeds planted are the same (Wheatley and Frieze 2011). Schools are like that, too. Two schools may be situated in different terroir even though children work and play similarly no matter where we visit. However, those children grow up in different cultural contexts that shape what they bring with them into school. Educators do the same. Because of that, each school represents a unique identity, one shaped locally, not by the federal government. While school communities certainly benefit from cross‐pollinating of ideas and resources, allowing them to localize their identity makes a lot of sense when it comes to figuring out what children need to thrive as learners.

Together the concepts of biodiversity and terroir combine to support the idea that schools in different localities need the freedom to be different. It doesn’t mean that neurology research shouldn’t drive educators’ understanding of how children learn and the pedagogies they need to use in response to that understanding. It doesn’t mean a curricula free‐for‐all instead of a ​coherent focus developed locally. It doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be any sense of standards at all for what’s important to learn in and across disciplines. It does mean that broad parameters should allow children who need to learn about simple machines to do far more than simply memorize them for a test. It means that if a child or class is obsessed with simple machines, they don’t need to stop immediately to begin studying phases of the moon. When learning is allowed to be project, problem, and passion driven, then children learn because of their terroir, not disengage in spite of it. When we recognize biodiversity in our schools as healthy, then we increase the likelihood that our ecosystems will thrive.

Four Actions to Increase Learning Biodiversity in Your School Community

“We need more than a genius hour once a week to build learning agency” (Genius Hour n.d.). Analyze how covering content standards for a test at the expense of creating a deep context through exploration of integrated content and experience impacts students in your class, school, district. Write this down and share your perspectives with colleagues. What can you together do to begin to tackle the problem of coverage at the expense of learning?

Add a small makerspace in your room or school. It can be anywhere and it doesn’t need to have a lot of expensive technology to get it started. Our librarians say that glue sticks, cardboard, and duct tape are a great start to building a makerspace. Ask students “What do you want to make?” Watch them and see what happens.

When you use project‐oriented learning, break the parameter rules by reducing your own constraints on what students can do. Give choices. Get kids to ask questions about what they want to learn. Teach kids the McCrorie ISearch approach and let them construct projects in first person versus third person (Zorfass and Copel 1995). Accept different media submissions from videos to websites, not just a poster or a written report.

Unschool your projects. Abandon an “everyone does the same project” approach. Make more white spaces in your day to move beyond the standards. Begin by asking learners what they are interested in. Grab inspiration from their responses and find connections from their interests to questions they might pursue. Look for curricular intersections as you support them to collaborate with each other in pursuit of learning that’s intrinsically interesting to them. If you are tethered to standards, creates spaces every day for students to explore outside of that box using technology including ​devices, books, maker and art supplies, and experts in and out of class. Teach your children with their intrinsic drive in mind. Get them talking with each other. Record their questions. Make opportunities to share their work with their parents, the principal, and others in class. Invite parents into the community for learning exhibitions that represent biodiversity.

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